One Week With Mars

After the last several hero releases, Mars can feel like old school Dota. There are no tree jumping abilities, spell duplications, vector targeting or transformations into a ball of pain. Instead, we have a hero that fits right in, and it is a great change of pace.

Some players might feel Mars is boring: after all, we’ve been spoiled by some of the more unique hero designs in the last couple of years. While to a certain extent it might be true and the hero is probably less exciting than Pangolier or Grimstroke were, he still occupies his own niche.

Last year was the year dual lanes made a return: changes to deny XP more or less forced professional teams and high level pub players to have a support in each lane. From how cautiously Valve has been increasing xp from denies, it looks like the intent is to still have dual lanes as a viable option, alongside defensive and offensive trilanes and roaming supports.

Mars is an offlane, dual lane king. He has a stun that couples as a waveclear, a pushback with a decent amount of damage that can also turn into a waveclear later in the game, and a wonky, but somewhat effective defense mechanism for the later stages of the game. Relatively long cooldowns aside, he is a great hybrid of utility and damage the game didn’t necessarily lack, but was somewhat short on.

Is Mars too Strong?

For a new hero, Mars looks pretty powerful. New hero releases often suffer from low win rate due to their popularity, but it isn’t the case with Mars, making him look overpowered from historical, statistical standpoint. There are a couple of points worth mentioning, however.

First of all, there is no question of what role the hero should occupy most of the time: he is a position three offlaner first and foremost, capable of being decent tempo mid in some specific cases, if you get last-pick “Broodmothered”, for example. There have been attempts to make the hero work as a position four support and even as a position one carry, but so far, from our personal experience, these attempts didn’t look convincing. He is too level and farm dependant to be a good support and his kit, stats and BAT don’t really support him as a carry.

Luckily for Mars, most people fully understand that and don’t try to shoehorn him into a position he is not going to shine in. For comparison, both Grimstroke and Dark Willow suffered greatly in their win rate department at release, because weaker players kept on insisting on playing the heroes mid, even in high level pubs.

Secondly, unlike most Dota 2-exclusive hero releases, Mars is pretty straightforward and easy to play. That means that the vast majority of players can do well with the hero in their first game and won’t need to try their abilities in several different games, before understanding how to utilize them properly. That directly improves his effectiveness and winrate.

Mars currently wins around 54% of his high level pub games, despite 45% pick rate. For most heroes released in the last couple of years, under the same statistical circumstances, we would be inclined to say that they are terribly overpowered. With Mars, however, we feel like the hero is just a little bit rough around the edges.

His first week winrate is mostly indicative of how at home he feels in Dota and how most players can execute the hero effortlessly. The hero is just a little bit too strong and going forward we will definitely see some nerfs to the hero, but they are unlikely to be too harsh. Overall, Mars is absolutely worth picking in the current meta, especially given how slow pubs are adapting to getting non-dual-lane options back.

What to skill and what to get

It is probably going to be a while before Mars gets his own go-to item build, but typical offlane items such as Blink Dagger and Vladmir’s Offering remain popular and very effective. From there, depending on what your team needs, you can either go more utility or more damage.

Skill-wise, the hero is slightly more stable: the vast majority of Mars players max Spear of Mars first, God’s Rebuke second and his passive, Bulwark, last. The effects of the latter don’t truly shine until the later stages of the game and most players either leave it at a value point or ignore it completely until level 10 or so. It does come incredibly handy if you are pushed out of your lane and need to jungle, though.

Interestingly, maxing God’s Rebuke first is statistically better. The difference is not that significant and is probably a result of higher farm speed and waveclear potential, but it is probably something worth keeping in mind for slower games where you might need to recover from a bad laning stage. Second level of Spear of Mars does ensure an extra hit from Mars' ultimate, so a 2-2-1-1 build is probably going to be what most players will converge on.

Talent-wise, getting +20 MS at level 10 is generally preferable: the hero has a massive 3.6 STR growth and +8 Strength doesn’t really change the hero completely. +20 MS on an already decently fast hero makes quite a bit of difference, especially given how he frequently needs to position himself precisely to land Spears and maximize Rebuke damage.

+8 armor at level 15 might look incredibly good on a Strength hero with a lot of natural HP, but +35 damage is absolutely massive given a guaranteed 280% crit. It increases the hero’s burst, DPS and farm speed and enhances the hero’s abilities, rather than overlap with them: +8 Armor is a lot, but given how the hero already takes 70% less damage from the front, this armor might be redundant.

The level 20 talent should be more or less self-explanatory: +150 damage on a 14 second cooldown at this stage of the game is more or less nothing, while extra 1.5 seconds of stun is massive, regardless of the stage of the game.

Finally, there is the level 25 choice and statistically it is almost dead even between the two options. In practice, on one hand you can heal up to 750 HP for your teammates, on the other: +80% damage can be pretty neat for burst requirements. We would probably still recommend going for the regen talent, but it is mostly a matter of preference, opinion and the specific game situation.

Closing Thoughts

Mars is an interesting new addition to Dota. Not necessarily in terms of new gameplay mechanics, but rather in the combination of the old ones. Iterative evolution processes are definitely less exciting in general, but we feel that Mars was exactly what the game needed. Especially after Pangolier, Grimstroke and Monkey King experiments.

At the end of the day, however, all new heroes found their place in the world of Dota and Mars will too, probably much faster than the aforementioned heroes. Use your time wisely and abuse Mars’ slightly-above-average power level to gain MMR. Or just play Viper.

The major idea of this hero is to reduce the hit and run tactics of dota which might be annoying sometimes. He forces the enemy to fight and punishes if they try to run. Fight me...bcuzzzz..... THIS IS DOTAAAAAAAA........

The hero is needs number nerfs. Spear is good aoe dmg with a stupidly long single target stun. His ulti is great control for teamfights or skirmishes, and a large amount of dmg combined with spear and rebuke. It has too short a cooldown for whaf it does. Rebuke is too efficient for waveclear and farm evem with minimal investment. At least a few will be be dealt with next patch.

The problem with Mars is his ultimate. It makes for too many OP combinations that are extremely difficult to deal with. Can you imagine a team consisting of dark willow, mars, pangolier, monkey king? Notice how they're all the newer heroes too? What the game needs is more single target abilities rather than aoe skills.

@LetMeShowYou damn right brother, he looks just like a second hand Zeus from Disney's Hercules. Remember when people hated Ursa's Alpine Stalker set SO MUCH that steam removed it from the market ? Change mars design I beg you

@guuz It's not that trying different ways necessarily makes them weaker, especially given that willow was actually pretty decent as mid at release. But it doesn't change that a lot of weaker players, even those who don't normally play mid, just played them as mid without fully understanding the heroes and just got wrecked.

Mars is actually quite balanced... Sure, the stun the first skill is long, but it is not like a single target ability of WK or Sven. You need to hit the hero first and then you need to pin the target to something to actually get the stun. It may be a little on the long side, but I don't see massive nerf coming to this... Maybe dropping it to 2.5 seconds at max from 2.8... And the stun needs to be long as you push the target away from your melee hero, so you need to walk to the stunned target before you get your hits in.

The shield smash thing is a great ability, but it has a decent cooldown on it to compensate. And only after you have it maxed out and some items you really start clearing waves with it. The cooldown makes sure you only see it once in a team fight. It is a good ability, but nothing overpowered.

While the abilities are good, you have to remember that this hero has no mana pool... He has really bad int gain and cannot spam his abilities unless you build some items for it.

And the hero clearly has a weakness against heroes that deal massive magic damage. The thing with Mars when compared to the other new heroes is that it is a solid hero, but flawed as well. He doesn't have an answer to all situations... The new heroes have been of type "how do we cram all of the good abilities we've added to this game to just 4 abilities"? Grimstroke is a masterpiece example of this. He has a massive wave clearing nuke, he has damaging silence, he has movement speed buffing stunning ability. Not to mention the ult that couples well with any and all single target spells in the game.

The winrate on Mars suggests that he is by no ways an op hero... Good solid hero, that could use a little trimming, but not OP by any stretch, if you draft correctly. But if you draft consists of melee right clickers, he sure is great against that.

I think Mars is a solid hero but his ulti should receive some tweeks because it's too versatile. Huge AOE, prevents enemies from going out or in, low formation time, combos with your spear, and also blocks ranged attacks. An ulti like this has too many uses for the cd it gets. You can isolate and kill supports easily, block off retreats, deny areas you want to secure, and even get secure tower pushes (if you put it behind or on the tower).
While he is completely helpless against spells, picking him strategically can completely fk up your opponents' lineup. If your opponent a) picks too many casters after seeing Mars, you can draft your lineup against it, and casters are usually harder to take structures so you can drag late game with your own physical cores. b) pick ranged dps, you last pick Mars and counter them heavily.
On a side note he gets completely fked by Viper and that is NOT good because Viper's too rampant now and this is one more reason to make Viper more rampant.

@kokoroko arguably making his ult AOE smaller might actually buff it in lane/jungle by making it easier to spear people to the walls of the arena rather then trees/cliffs. The smaller size might also make it harder to juke and dodge the spear too.

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